I. 1913
The year 1913 was disturbing, and the year was a big 13 that made the mentally sensitive person irrepressibly associated with disaster. During the year, Dunantha wrote the year as 12+1. Schoenberg, tormented by the premonition of the coming of the Great Tribulation, was highly sensitive to the number 13, and when he discovered that the title of the opera Moses und Aaron had a total of thirteen letters, he crossed out Aaron's second a, allowing the opera to be renamed Moses and Aaron. However, when 1913 came, Schoenberg's disaster was still in the premonition stage, and there were still 4 months before the "slap concert" was staged in Vienna's Musikverein, and for Schoenberg's motherland at this moment, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, especially the imperial army, the disaster of 1913 followed from the beginning of the year.
The year 1912 was disastrous for the Empire, when Serbian troops openly crossed Austro-Hungarian territory to attack the collapsing Ottoman Empire during the Balkan Wars. And when austria-Hungary tried to mobilize troops to threaten Serbia's adventures, the terrible Russian big brother behind the Serbian children raised the stick in his hand. There was no chance of victory against Serbia and Russia, and even then the Empire was unable to mobilize its full strength effectively. National contradictions made the Empire weaker than ever, requests for Serbian military mobilization and army budgets were not hesitantly rejected by the Parliament of Budapest, and in Neletania, although the Ministers of the Empire were sure to get the Parliament to approve military appropriations, they were resolutely resisted by minority parties, and the parliamentarians of Poland, Ukraine, and the Czech Republic delayed the time-critical military appropriations bill by obstructing the agenda, and finally the Empire could only borrow in the United States on humiliating terms to pay for military mobilization.
Even if the athletes themselves were a disaster, and the mobilized Czech soldiers were marching from Prague in a neat formation to sing the Serbian national anthem, if this was enough to disgrace the Empire, then after the Czech soldiers who sang the Serbian national anthem were finally loaded onto the train, something worse happened, and the Czech women in Prague lay down on the railroad tracks, saying that if they wanted to send their husbands and brothers to the front, they would simply let the train roll over them. The authorities were reluctant to take such a risk, so the mobilization of Czech troops was stranded, and the Already weak forces of the Empire became even weaker.
If it were not for the military support of the Empire's traditional ally, Kaiser Wilhelm II, who frightened Russia, austria-Hungary would inevitably suffer great humiliation in 1912, with Archduke Franz Ferdinand stating that "it would be another Battle of Koenig Gretz, or the Battle of Solferino, and unlike being driven out of Germany and Italy, this time the Empire was driven out of the Balkans without firing a shot." ”
Pictured: Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Crown Prince of Austria-Hungary, and duchess Of Hohenburg, who did not receive the title of Grand Duchess because of intermarriage, established his own military office at the Belvedere Palace where he lived as he grew older, and those favored by the Crown Prince were also called belvedere darlings.
But in any case, as 1912 drew to a close, the exhausted empire was once again in ruins, and the Habsburg monarchies were once again given a breather. The terrified Empire came to the door of 1913. But here comes the problem. In the summer of 1912, the first of the Empire's first class of "dreadnoughts", the United Forces, was launched, and by December 1912 it was finally completed and delivered to the Imperial Navy, which was the third most populous European power, but only the seventh in naval strength, and even the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which had been defeated by its former subordinates and left the Italian Navy behind.
The first Austro-Hungarian dreadnought on the United Forces
But! Yes, the term was used heavily in the history of every declining empire. However, in the acceptance of the Navy, people were shocked to find that this huge ship, which was regarded as a symbol of the military power of the Empire on the sea, "the Crown Prince's big toy", Grand Duke Franz Ferdinand did not participate in the coronation of King George V in order to preside over the launch ceremony. Due to the unqualified armored steel and turret, the weight exceeded the standard, and the speed was nearly 50% slower than the designed maximum speed of 20 knots during the sea test. The news of a dreadnought launched in 1912 at a speed of ten knots was enough to make Italians laugh for years. The scandal caused an earthquake in the Imperial Admiralty, the relevant officials resigned one after another, the Škoda Company, which produced armored steel and turrets, was also attacked by public opinion and condemned by parliament, and finally the naval technical department barely solved the problem by improving the boiler and turbine design and replacing the unqualified armored steel and turrets.
The Imperial Navy was already infamous in the early years of 1913, followed by the Army. At this time, The Minister of War, Ofenberg, had just announced his resignation, because last year several newspapers had exposed the appalling "U Plan" drawn up by the Imperial General Staff, and all the operational plans of the Reich General Staff were named after the initials of a hypothetical enemy or area of operation, such as Plan R for Russia, Plan I for Italy, and Plan B for Serbia (B here stands for Balkans). The U project is appalling because the U here stands for Ungarn (Hungary in German). The U plan was to quickly occupy Budapest with rail and Danube transport forces, eliminate the fourth army of the five Hungarian armies that could be loyal to Budapest, then close the parliament and government of Budapest, appoint a military administrator, and end the dual monarchy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Plan U exposed The Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand's consistent hostility to Hungary, but it was impossible to publicly condemn the Crown Prince, so angry Hungarian public opinion pointed to the Army, and eventually the Minister of War, General Offenberg, stepped forward and took full responsibility, and the Crown Prince, who was protected by the Crown Prince, was not punished and simply resigned. But with his resignation new problems came to light.
The open-minded resented the corruption of the Imperial army, but he also had many of his own ministers of war, the darling of the Belvedere General Offenberg
In early 1913, a low-ranking military officer named Heinrich Schwartz exposed the Insider Trading Scandal of General Offenberg to the Vienna Stock Exchange. "Secretary of war insider trading", what the hell is this? What insider trading does the Secretary of State for the Army and not a securities practitioner take? In fact, there is no technical content, although the Minister of War is not a securities practitioner, but the suppliers of Army procurement, most of them are listed companies, if which company gets a large order from the War Department, the company's stock will undoubtedly rise after the disclosure of the news, and the person who knows best in the whole country which company will disclose the news of the Large Order of the War Department is the Minister of War, who uses a pseudonym or other people's accounts to buy the company's shares in advance. This kind of thing is actually not a new thing in the 19th century, and military officers from all over the world rely on this to make extra money, such as Santa Claus of the Prussian Staff, the hero of the two wars in 1866 and 1870, the chief of the general staff "Old Moltke", who also relied on this way to make some money for himself, but he was not the Minister of War and could not buy the stock of suppliers, but the Prussian Kingdom adhered to the traditional conservative ideology and was unwilling to build a state-owned railway, but the country was promoted by innovative staff officers like Moltke Sr. There was also a growing demand for transporting troops by rail in wartime, so as a means of compromise, the Royal Government would subsidize and invest in certain railways of "military value" in accordance with the recommendations of the General Staff Headquarters, and such news disclosed that the stock price of the railway company must have risen, and which company could get such subsidies and government investment depended on the General Staff, so as the chief of the General Staff, the old Moltke bought the shares of the railway company in advance, which was undoubtedly insider trading. It was only the victory of the war that made the old Moltke a hero of the German Empire, and no one dared to accuse him. But Offenberg was different, the U-Plan exposure made him a thorn in the side of the Hungarians, and he had always appeared as a critic of corruption in the Imperial Army, and now he himself was also exposed to such a fierce material, and for a while Offenberg became the target of public criticism, and worse, Heinrich Schwartz committed suicide shortly thereafter, and before his death, he broke the news reporter about General Ofenberg and his correspondence, and as soon as the letters were exposed, the corruption within the Army was made public.
Pictured: Chief of the General Staff Conrad von Herzendorff, once the darling of the Belvedere, but because of his unrequited love in the eyes of the religious Crown Prince, his image has plummeted, and the fate of his downfall in 1913, when the scandal broke out, was already in sight.
It seems that when the scandal was full of storms in 1913, the only person who laughed to the end was General Conrad, the chief of the general staff, but General Conrad did not have time to rejoice for a long time before the "Jandrich Incident" came. In April 1913, the protagonist of the "Jandrić Incident", artillery lieutenant Sedomir Jandrich, was a Serbian from Bosnia, the Army accused him of selling artillery intelligence to the Russians, and Jandrić was found guilty, which was originally a small spy case, but the bad thing was that Lieutenant Youngdrich was a friend of Kurt Conrad, the son of the new chief of the general staff, General Conrad, and if the relationship was nothing more than that, worse, in the process of investigating the Jandrich case, A new espionage case, suspected of Kurt Conrad's Italian girlfriend, was directed at Kurt himself, and the military suspected that Kurt had stolen top-secret documents from his father's study and sold them to the Russians. By the spring of 1913, the Imperial Navy, the former Minister of War, and the Chief of the Army's Chief of staff were all drawn into scandal. Disastrous 1913 began. And the climax of the scandal has not yet come.
Second, the spring weekend
On Saturday, 24 May 1913, Colonel Raeder, chief of staff of the Eighth Army in Prague, arrived in Vienna in his own Daimler car, accompanied by three officers, in Room One of the Kromzer Hotel near the Hofburg Palace. He talked to the officers in his hotel room, and after the officers had left, he dined at a restaurant near the hotel, where he read newspapers, wrote letters, and wrote notes, then walked the streets of Vienna and returned to his hotel room at midnight.
Pictured: Alfred Reddell, played by the gorgeous Braundall, in this scene the Jewish medic puts his arm around Reddell and says how good it would be if you were a Jew, and Raeder replied that you would be jewish.
At five o'clock in the morning on Sunday, May 25, the officers sent messengers to wake Colonel Reddell, but found his body slumped in an easy chair. He pulled the trigger in his mouth with a Browning pistol, the bullet flew off his brain and jaw, a large amount of blood spurted from his left nostril, and the pistol fell on the floor on the right hand side, and the blood stains were dried up and frozen when it was found. He left three kiloons and two letters on the table, one to his old boss, General Arthur Giles, one to his brother, and a short suicide note that read ," "Ask for forgiveness and forgiveness."
Or the gorgeous Brander played by Reddell, here he tries to raise a gun to commit suicide, but can't get his hands down, and eventually swallows the gun and dies
The Viennese press showed a consistently agile response, which was reported by major newspapers, including Le Liberia, but with much the same content: "Colonel Alfred Redel, chief of staff of the Eighth Army in Prague, committed suicide during a sensory hallucination attack. This gifted officer has recently suffered from insomnia, and he had a brilliant future."
The Viennese press tried to publicize Raeder's death as a suicide due to insomnia, and the fact that the army really wanted to cover up seemed self-evident, and by all accounts it was a suicide caused by the despair of middle-ranking officers common in the Imperial army. Colonel Raeder was born on March 14, 1864, in Remberg, Galicia (present-day Lviv, Ukraine), to a family of impoverished railway clerks. Although he had no money or background, Raeder was a school bully, successfully admitted to the Vienna War College, which had an admission rate of only 50 per thousand, and entered the General Staff in 1900.
As a poor, untouched, but intelligent and professional, and industrious school-bullying officer, Colonel Riddell and Chief of the General Staff, General Conrad, Bosnian military chief General Portiolek, such "Belvedere darlings", were all the waymen, before Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand began to push for military reform, the lazy aristocratic officers in the Imperial army admired these people for their tirelessness and ability to work. In 1902, General Arthur von Gilles transferred Raedel, who was still a captain, into the counter-espionage agency managed by the General Staff itself, and for many years Raeder always went to work in the ministry very early, worked late, then ate in a café and read the newspaper, and then returned to the office to work late into the night, leaving colleagues with the image of a typical workaholic.
As the Crown Prince promoted the modernization of the army, Raeder was trusted by the Crown Prince for his work experience and modern military qualities, and soon became the head of the military counter-espionage structure, under his leadership the anti-espionage apparatus of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was greatly strengthened, introducing modern reconnaissance methods including surveillance, recording, and videography, and also established a fingerprint database. In 1907 Raeder was promoted to colonel and was allowed to report directly to the Military Office of the Crown Prince of Belvedere. He was later transferred to the chief of staff of the Eighth Army, and by the time most of his peers were captains, Raeder was only one step away from the general. The greatest possibility that such a person committed suicide in 1913 was based on a despair of the future. At that time, the military expenditure of the Austro-Hungarian Empire did not increase for decades, the income of officers was poor, and if the rank of lieutenant retired, the income was not as good as that of tram drivers. Therefore, around 1900, when the economy was booming, it was not uncommon for middle-level officers in the army to commit suicides.
Colonel Alfred Raeder, an important promoter of the modernization of the Austro-Hungarian counter-espionage apparatus, was also a victim of his own achievements as a spy
There have also been reports that Colonel Raedel's death was related to his counter-espionage work, and the Viennese newspapers suggested that Raedel must have suffered a nervous breakdown caused by some of the "secret activities" he had been engaged in for a long time, and then raised a gun to commit suicide. A young, workaholic officer who had long been engaged in dangerous counter-espionage work eventually committed suicide by raising a gun on a Saturday night in May 1913. In the week after May 26, 1913, the viennese newspaper reports basically gave the impression. If it ends like this, it won't be enough to cause any scandal, at best, some accusations about the way the military is promoted, and there are problems such as bureaucracy and redundancy among senior officers. But because of the hard work of a small journalist, everything was changed.
Third, the professionalism of a journalist
Since 26 May, Viennese newspapers have reported the death of Colonel Raeder, but the content is generally the same and highly consistent. The reason is not difficult for the Viennese readers, who have always been keen on politics, to speculate, and it must be that the War Department has spent money to cover up the problems in the use of the army and promotions. But the salaries of officers are not as small as today, so Colonel Riddle, although widely concerned, did not turn into an uproar.
But! Yes and yes, but all events always have their amazing way of peaking and looping. The same goes for the Raeder Affair. Agung Kisch, at this time, was a young reporter for the Bohemian newspaper. Like most young journalists, Kisch is not only young and young, so he has a common hobby of young people, that is, playing football, and on Sunday 25 May, The Storm team to which Kisch belongs plays away to Horeshowwitz, but unfortunately their team's most powerful shooter, Locksmith Hans Wagner, did not play. Wagner arrived at the team on Monday to give a vague explanation to the captain. Kisch learned that he hadn't come because he had been called by the military to open a private room at army headquarters, where he had seen a lot of strange things, ladies' gauze skirts, fragrant curtains, pink stumps. At a time when the Colonel Raeld incident was attracting widespread attention, the reporter's instinct realized that this was not a simple coincidence. So Kisch gathered information and was the first to write an article in a Berlin newspaper questioning Colonel Raeder's death. Why was Colonel Riddle buried so quickly after his death? Why was Colonel Ridel's funeral not attended by an honor guard, nor were relatives, friends, and colleagues from the army present? Why did Reddell's relatives secretly change their surnames? Did Colonel Riddle really die of insomnia? Was his death really decent? Mr. Kisch tells you that these are all cover-ups, that Colonel Riddle is actually a homosexual, and that he died in a scandal caused by homosexuality!
Agung Yerevan Kisch, 28 years old in 1913, was a bohemian newspaper reporter who detonated the Redel affair and later became known as a mad journalist
A stone strikes a thousand waves. The Raeder incident, which attracted widespread attention but never became sensational news, was immediately sensational as soon as it was linked to the homosexual issue by the teacher, so the major newspapers followed up, the people in Chaoyang District were very excited, the industrious reporters dug up more material in just a few days, all kinds of new news occupied the page, won the attention, and the storm came.
Even though Raeder's family was poor and promoted to colonel, his salary was still poor, but he lived a luxurious life. He bought a luxury apartment in Vienna, rented a luxurious mansion in Prague, raised four thoroughbred horses, and hired five servants. Earning less than 10,000 crowns a year, he amassed more than two million crowns of property and drove a Daimler car worth sixteen thousand crowns, which cost more than 100,000 crowns a year. The Kromser Hotel, where he committed suicide, was where he often drove from Prague to Vienna to meet his "friend" Lieutenant Stefan Holingka. The landlady of Lieutenant Hollinka's apartment in Vienna said that Lieutenant Hollinka's apartment was a place of revelry, and That Raeder often came here to meet his good friend Hollinka privately and lied to the landlady that he had come to visit his nephew. The landlady revealed to reporters that she had always wondered why an officer could be so generous and drive around in such an expensive car, and she speculated that Colonel Raedle was engaged in some "unseemly business" in the ministry.
All of these reports piqued curiosity, and corruption, peach-colored news, gay scandals and suicides among officers were all in one, stirring up the curiosity, sense of justice, and sexual fantasies of readers. Raeder, who died in the last days of May, took the spotlight of viennese. There was talk everywhere, and the Empire's two-headed eagle was once again dimmed.
The Reddell Affair
The Raeder affair was full of storms, rumors and debunked facts were all over the place, and the big and small heads of Viennese readers were as excited as the big heads and small heads. The army was reduced to a thousand fingers, and at such a difficult moment, the army had to come out and clarify the facts. On May 29, the army's newspaper, The Military Review, wrote: "On the night of Saturday and Sunday, 24th to 25th of this month, former Colonel Reddell committed suicide. On the eve of Raeder's action, we are about to convict him of the following grave and well-documented faults: 1. homosexual acts which put him in financial difficulty; 2. sell to foreign agents information on the official contingency measures of our country which is secret".
The military review confirmed the homosexual scandal dug up by the press, and even more violently, Colonel Raeder, as the head of the military counter-espionage agency, was himself a Russian spy, and for more than a decade the former head of the counter-espionage organization, who had been awarded the Iron Crown of Lombardy for his counter-espionage exploits, betrayed the military intelligence of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to Russia. Officers, corruption, homosexuality, spies, all the appalling factors came together, and the circle of public opinion exploded.
But before we care about the public opinion community, let's first look at the whole picture of the Reddell incident, and after one hundred and four years, it is much easier for us to do this. First of all, whether Raedel is a spy or not, the question is now basically unquestionable. The easiest way to discuss whether a person is a spy or not is to go to his backstage boss and ask him directly, which seems silly, but about twenty years before the Reddell incident, when the French captain Dreyfus was accused of being a German spy and caused an uproar in Paris, a countess used this simple and rude method, she went directly to Dreyfus's backstage boss, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Kaiser Wilhelm did not hesitate to reply, "Dreyfus is certainly not my spy, Otherwise how could I not know? Although Emperor Nicholas II did not personally admit that Colonel Raeder was a Russian spy, the documents and reports of the Russian spy agency proved this. There is no disagreement today between Russian historians and Austro-Hungarian historians on the question of Colonel Ridel being a Russian spy.
It is generally believed that Raeder, who was still a captain as early as 1901, was ordered to go to Russia to study Russian, and that In Russia Captain Raeder not only studied the Russian language carefully but also studied a Russian youth in too much depth, and the evidence of this incident unfortunately fell into the hands of the Russian military intelligence apparatus led by Colonel Nikolai Bakchushen. The homosexual scandal was fatal to Austro-Hungarian officers, who threatened Redel to sell them intelligence. In 1902, Raeder betrayed the Austro-Hungarian war plan against Russia to the Russians, which attracted the attention of the Austro-Hungarian counter-espionage agency, General von Gilles ordered Raeder to investigate the matter, and Raeder took the opportunity to arrest several Russian spies to clear his suspicions and create his own image of shrewdness and strength.
General von Gills, Raeder's teacher and superior, the kind of serious, enlightened but somewhat lazy aristocratic officer common in the Austro-Hungarian Empire
For a decade between 1903 and 1913, Raeder was Russia's most powerful spy, and as head of the military counter-espionage apparatus, he was ordered to train and send spies to infiltrate Russia, while at the same time providing the list of spies to the Russian counterintelligence agency, paralyzing the Austro-Hungarian intelligence network in Russia. Taking advantage of his work in the General Staff, Raeder sold the R plan of the Austro-Hungarian war against Russia and the B plan of the War against Serbia, as well as the plan of the Austro-Hungarian offensive, the mobilization plan, the sequence and the fortress data, in order to obtain large sums of money from the Russians to maintain his luxurious life.
After being transferred to the chief of staff of the Eighth Army in Prague, he used his position to betray to Russia the German-Austrian plan of coordinated operations in Poland and Galicia. Russia's letting newspapers openly disclose the plan seriously stimulated the German and Austrian counter-espionage agencies, and finally led to a large-scale investigation that determined Raeder's fate. In early 1913 a letter sent from Germany to Vienna was returned because no one accepted it, and the German letter checker opened the letter and found six kilos of cash, which aroused suspicion from the German counter-espionage agency, and was then informed to the Austro-Hungarian counter-espionage agency, who at this time was headed by Major Maximilian Jung, a student and successor trained by Colonel Raeder. On May 9, 1913, another letter containing a large amount of cash was sent from Germany to Vienna, and counterintelligence agencies monitored the post office. On 25 May, the letter was signed off, but the recipient left in a taxi, the secret police were unable to catch up with the taxi, and just as people were desperate, the taxi returned to the post office. The secret police immediately took control of the taxi and ordered the driver to drive back to where the previous guest had dropped off. The taxi took them to the Kremzer Hotel, where Major Jung hid in the lobby of the hotel with the police and the driver to observe the passing passengers, and finally the driver recognized his old boss, Colonel Riddle.
Maximilian Jung, head of the Austro-Hungarian military counter-espionage apparatus in 1913, a student and successor of Colonel Raeder, was also the one who captured Raeder
The Raeder incident was immediately reported to the chief of staff, General Conrad, but General Conrad, who was suffering from the scandal, only hoped that the Raeder incident would calm down as soon as possible, and the detailed interrogation and review would make the damage caused by Raeder more accurately assessed, but also allow Raedel's confession to threaten more people, especially his mentors and superiors in the General Staff, who was one of such mentors and superiors. So when Raeder was summoned from Prague to Vienna for cross-examination, General Conrad, who was having dinner at the Grand Hotel, said to the officers who had been ordered to interrogate Raeder, "Raeder needs a pistol to do the right thing."
In the early hours of May 25, 1913, Redel committed suicide by raising a gun at the Kremze Hotel, and the army bribed the Viennese newspapers to describe Redel's death as a suicide caused by the desperation of Austro-Hungarian officers who were often underpaid. To the extent that Raeder's rebellion was so great that at least for both Germany and Austria, Raedel was taken to the grave, and the army had to measure the seriousness of the problem by prying open the documents found in Raeder's secret safe. The locksmith who pried the locks told the reporters on the team about his anecdote, and Kisch's brain hole was wide open, changing the fate of the Reddell incident.
V. Towards 1914
The Raeder affairs detonated the entire Austro-Hungarian Empire, not only the press but also the parliament, conservatives regarded the Raeder affair as a symbol of bourgeois corruption, while the emerging proletariat lashed out at the government and the army from the same angle, the Vienna parliament demanded a judicial investigation into the Raeder affair, while the Budapest parliament has always been schadenfreude about the army and is now talking openly about Hungary's own army building.
Newspapers have been circling the Raeder affair since May, and the Hungarian newspapers, which were angry because of Plan U, followed suit, followed by German nationalist newspapers, Czech nationalist newspapers, Polish nationalist newspapers, and Ukrainian nationalist newspapers. People questioned why the Empire's army, which had cost millions of crowns, had become a hotbed of corruption. Why was Raeder so poorly earned but lived such a lavish life without any suspicion among the Imperial army? To what extent was the Imperial Army corrupted? Why did the head of a military counter-espionage agency become a Russian spy himself? Why was Raeder allowed to commit a dignified suicide after being proven guilty of such a felony? And the problem of homosexuality! There was also homosexuality, and the political issues were too serious, but the peach-colored incident was enough to lift the spirits of the readers, so the newspapers repeatedly reported on the homosexuality in the army.
And the army, at a time when its reputation was on the verge of collapse, added fuel to the fire in clumsy justifications. The army declared in its newspaper that "Redel, though dressed in the emperor's uniform, was not at all an Austro-Hungarian officer, because the officer corps was pure and Reddell was a Jew." Such rhetoric failed to appease anyone, and the only result was to infuriate the Jewish clique that had been sidelined and thrown into the attack on the empire. The tide of public opinion guided General Conrad to finally shut his mouth cautiously before gradually cooling down.
The Raeder Affair also caused a stir in the Imperial court, with Emperor Franz Joseph insisting that Raeder should be tried and convicted, but Raeder was given a dignified explanation. The Emperor was furious, and the Crown Prince took the opportunity to once again advocate the reform of the Imperial Army. The disillusioned emperor accepted the crown prince's proposal and appointed him director of the imperial armed forces. This position was in charge of the Empire's armed forces in peacetime, and in wartime it automatically became commander-in-chief of the Imperial armed forces. Vacant since the death of the previous governor, Archduke Albrecht in 1895, the crown prince's appointment meant that the crown prince was allowed by the emperor to advance the reform of the military apparatus as a whole. At the low point of its reputation, the Austro-Hungarian army welcomed a reform-minded commander.
The Crown Prince's first proposal was to remove General Conrad and replace him with someone who could sweep away the ills and reinvigorate morality and discipline. Soon the Crown Prince proposed two candidates, General Potiolek and General Terstyansky. At the autumn exercises of 1913, General Ofenberg, anxious to wash away the effects of the scandal, played at an extra high level, beating the troops of another Belvedere darling, General Brudman, to the brink of collapse in a combat exercise. However, the Crown Prince, who was watching the battle, did not want General Offenberg to win, so he ordered the suspension of the actual combat exercise and the "flag planting exercise" in which the red and blue armies attacked the bunting flag planted on the ground together.
The Chief of the General Staff, General Conrad, angrily protested to the Crown Prince and Director of the Armed Forces, but the Crown Prince did not show weakness and the two broke out into a fierce quarrel, and the Crown Prince reminded General Conrad not to forget Wallenstein. The fate of the fall of the Chief of the General Staff is clear. At the same time, as a compensation for his own intervention in military exercises, the Crown Prince announced that in the spring of 1914, in addition to the fixed annual exercises, a military exercise against Serbia would be added in Bosnia, where General Podiolek was the military commander.
Pictured: General Portiolek, bosnian military chief, one of the proposed candidates for the chief of the general staff in 1913, sat proudly in the crown prince's car that spring of 1914.
1912 was a disastrous year for the Empire, and 1913 was even worse, but 1914 was finally coming, and in the spring of 1914 the Crown Prince would attend military exercises in Bosnia and then visit Sarajevo, the Imperial Army would have a new Chief of the General Staff, and in 1914 perhaps everything would be getting better!